Think Like A Game Designer - Devin Low — From Magic to Marvel: Game Narratives, Corporate Design Insights, and the Power of Effective Communication (#13)

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

Devin Low is an award-winning designer who’s worked on some of the most popular games in the world. He was the head developer of Magic: The Gathering, and the lead designer of Legendary: The Marvel Deck-Building Game and Plants vs. Zombies Heroes.  This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to Think Like a Game Designer. I'm your host, Justin Gary. In this podcast, I'll be having conversations with brilliant game designers from across the industry with a goal of finding universal principles that anyone can apply in their creative life. You could find episodes and more at think like a game designer.com. In today's episode, I speak with Devin Lowe. Of all the people I've had on my podcast, Devin's career probably most closely parallels my own. We both started off by competing on the Magic Pro Tour. We both made well-known deck-building games, and we both worked on large trading card games for other companies. In his case, he ended up becoming the head developer from Magic the Gathering at Wizards of the Coast, also the creative director at Pop Cap for Plants v. Zombies Heroes, and he's had countless other credits to his name. Devin has an amazing insight into the design process and has some very strong opinions about how design and storytelling should work,

and we dig into a lot of that in today's talk. We talk about not only the storytelling in games and how it differs from traditional, storytelling, but also the differences in design and inspiration between Ascension and his game Marvel Legendary, the process of creating huge trading card games like Magic the Gathering, what it's like to work at big companies versus small solo projects, and the difference between digital and physical game design. There's a lot of insights here, and you'll see narrative threads that echo as he and I debate back and forth some of the finer points.

So we really do get into the weeds here. So for those you that really love that kind of stuff, you're going to have a lot to digest here. So I'll let you get into it. And without further ado, here is Devin Lowe. Hello and welcome. All right, I am here with Devin Lowe. Devin, it's exciting to finally get to talk to you with a deep dive in design conversations.

Likewise. I'm happy to be here. Yeah. So, you know, we met up at Paul Kahn, which was a really great gathering of some amazing people and amazing designers. And I, you know, you and I have been in the same circles for a very very good. very long time and we've met a couple times. We've never really been able to have an extended conversation until then, I think. So this was a very fortuitous and fun event. Yeah, I've been really enjoying listening to the podcast. I've heard all the episodes so far. And it's, it's a great way to get

different people's thoughts and some perspectives. Yeah. So I always, as you've been listening to the podcast, you always know, I try to get started with, you know, how did you get into the gaming industry? You've been, you know, in these circles and building games I love for a long time now. What kind of got brought you hear in the first place. Yeah, so growing up, my dad is a big historical miniatures wargamer, and so he's painting-led figures of Carthaginians and Swiss mercenaries and a bunch of Incas and Aztecs and different historical periods of areas. And he would take myself and my brother to these gaming conventions and people would have these elaborate terrain setups and they've built, you know, the Alamo and you're going to fight that battle. And they've built the Punic Wars and they've built,

you know, sci-fi setups and just crazy, crazy terrain types, and you're playing most of the miniature war games on them. And so gaming was a part of my life from a pretty young age that way. My mom was also a teacher, and she's taught in an area of the school that had a lot of puzzles, had some board games, had ways to think in new directions with those tools, I guess I would say. And so those two influences kind of definitely had an effect on me growing up. So were you like designing games as a kid and playing with games, or you were just playing with your parents? Honestly, yes.

We'd go to like Point Con and Convention at West Point, go to Storkon in Pennsylvania, and I'd play all these games, and I wouldn't have money to buy them. And so I'd go home and make that own versions. And I'd take index cards and cut them up and take a pencil. And like I played nuclear war, the card game at a convention. And I go home and I wouldn't have it. And I'd like, make my own nuclear war. And while I was in there, it'd be like, you know, we'd cool this game of like tanks and infantry as well as nuclear bombs. Let's make that.

And I still have a bunch of those old sort of index card games. And some of them were like, oh, I played a game with wizards and spells and towers and they're fighting each other and let's meet my own game. But I'll face it on D&D and I'll adapt the DED spells in this card game format. Now we're casting lightning bolts and fireballs. We're someone who works to fight each other. And at the time, I did not think that that would lead to anything. But looking back, it's like pretty crazy what a signpost that seems like. Yeah, well, it's easy to tell the story of your life in retrospect, I found.

That's a good point. It's the telling it in the moment and trying to project ahead that's always difficult. But you can create that sort of narrative thread. And it's funny, I talk to people all the time, you know, when you're sort of lost in where you want to go with your life, it's really looking back and just picking up a few threads. Like, what are the things you chose to do when nobody was telling you to do anything? What are the things that, like, you know, got you excited on a day-to-day basis? and then suddenly it's like to help you find that path as crazy as it might be.

Yeah, I think it'd make a good point that retrospectively it's easier to kind of fit a narrative thread to the whole thing. And I probably could find anecdotes in my past that if I ended up in some of the career, I could look at a signposts to what I would eventually have done. Like I remember as a kid being asked, what do you want to do when you grow up. And I like math. I like numbers. I like this sort of toy cash register I had.

And so I said, I want to be a cashier. That's what I want to do. And like, that's a fine thing to do. many people are that and that's great. But if I had ended up doing that, I'd be like, yeah, of course. Like, as a kid, that's what I wanted to do. And here I am. Yeah, no, I mean, I loved the ocean and, you know, it was pretty good at science.

So I wanted to be a marine biologist for the longest time. Awesome. And it's, you know, actually, it gets a little bit away from the, you know, sort of pure designer chat. But I really do believe that, like, the ability to tell a good story for your life is, is the critical skill of, you know, feeling fulfilled and connected to what's going on. and it's, you know, recognizing that it's a story. No matter where you are, what you're doing, you're crafting this narrative. But if you feel like you've got that epic scope,

then maybe I can tie this back to design, because that's what we try to do with game design too. You know, you want to make sure that your players get to tell this narrative that is like, okay, look at me. I started here and I went down this path and I made this choice, and that led to this thing. And then whether it's an epic win or an epic fail, that story is the thing that you remember at the end.

That's what makes it, that's what makes it cohesive. Totally. I'm a big fan of the Hamilton musical, and one of the themes is who lives, who dies, who tells your story. And there's different ways you can tell a story about somebody's life, like you're saying. And as you interact with other people, you often have a narrative in your head about the way that they, you perceive their life as being. And if you think someone's a jerk, everything they do, you're like, that's because they're a jerk. You think someone's a cool person. Everything they do, you're like, oh, it's because a cool person, right?

You will find ways to take the exact same behaviors and attribute different motivations to them. At work and my day job, we talk about different player types, and one of them is a mercerty. storywriters. And this isn't people that want to literally write a story on paper or on a computer, and it's not people who want to live the story of Lord of the Rings by playing video games, who want to write their own stories by the actions they take. And when you're making board games or digital games and you see people telling stories they're friend about the experience you had in your game, you're like, oh, this is good, I've gotten there, you know, because you want people to have a moment so excited that they can't wait but to share it with their buddies.

And it's been fun to see that in some of the games I've got me up here you work on. Yeah, well, so I wasn't looking to leave this thread at all. I mean, I actually, yeah, I want to tell, because how you tell stories in these games is, I think, a really great, you know, let's get concrete with it. Because, you know, when you're working on games that are, you know, I was going to reference Magic specifically, where it's this wide open thing. And there is, in fact, these days, especially, I think they're doing a far better job than they ever have of telling a sort of more traditional narrative that you can relate to. But the heart of that kind of game is that you can create your own narrative and there's this huge variety of different possibilities.

How did you guys think about that then or how do you think about that now? What is it, what are the design choices that you can make where you can create or ruin those kinds of experiences? Giving people, you know, people have bad beat stories all the time in poker, magic gathering, and in other games where they say, you never believe this happened. this thing to happen to be. And the reason those kind of stories are compelling to tell and to live are that there is something that can happen is very unlikely and then sometimes it happens in a surprising way. And part of how that can play out in game design is people who are behind and

have an opportunity to come from, come back from behind and win anyway. That's huge in sports, which are often great examples of game design. It's huge in card games and video games. The ability to be behind in League of Legends or something and somehow find a way to come back and win is often a story, you just can't wait to tell somebody because it's a kind of story that humans really react to. So is it all about the sort of low probability high swing moments? Because those obviously are a huge, huge part of what the stories we reference. That's certainly part of it. If I had to sort of think of other examples off the top of my head, it kind of thing makes you tell a story. When you work

together to part or to cheat something you couldn't achieve by yourself, that's often the thing you want to tell people about. If you beat somebody that you perceive is better than you, not just from behind moments, but maybe just out-thought them somehow, that's a thing you often can't wait to tell people like, hey, you know this guy who's really good at this game, I beat him, let me tell you all about it.

Let me post a screenshot or let me show you this milestone I've achieved. Right. So we're sort of hitting on the key, key narrative points of sort of, you know, the underdog, key narrative points of cooperation, of the sort of, you know, overcoming adversity, being able to find and, you know, sort of this learning thread of,

okay, I figured something out that I didn't see before. Now I've, now everything looks different to me, right? So, you know, when you're like, oh, I use these cards that I thought were terrible and now I would look what I was able to do with them and now there's this whole other frame. I mean, I'll, we'll jump around a little bit, but, you know, we both have a lot of experience with deck building games. And even though I had a ton of experience with trading card games

and I knew a ton of stuff. It wasn't, I did not figure out the chapel and trashing cards thing the first time I played Dominion. Right. Right. It was like, and then somebody showed that to me. And I was like, oh, my God. If I remove cards from my deck, everything gets, the whole game is changed. And then, of course, that was the most powerful thing you could do for the longest time.

Right, right. And so that for me was a huge moment and a huge story that I'm telling even now a decade later because it was like just this aha moment of learning is a critical part of game storytelling. Right. I think it's a good example of wait-tale. So yourself is a breakthrough moment where you suddenly realize that this interaction is there. You didn't realize before. TCGs and deck-building games have a ton of interactions that are unexpected. There's so many different moving pieces in them that work in different ways and are intentionally breaking the rules, right?

Those card games are trying to break through rules all the time. And so when you put those pieces together, you can suddenly see an interaction you didn't see before. It makes you feel like a genius. And you can't wait to tell your friend about that. That's a great way to have those sort of storytelling beats as well. So it's interesting because when we started talking about this, you know, it was like, all right, well, is the primacy of story, you know, the bad beat or the, you know, epic, epic victory story? And now I think we've hit on what I think may be a more primal thread of, I don't know if it's fair to call it story, but the, that learning and discovery moment, I think is the heart of like what makes games interesting to us. Right.

because when that runs out, you don't want to play the game anymore, right? Like, tick-tac-toe, you can figure out that, like, you know, playing in a corner is a good strategy versus playing in the middle. And then at some point, you're like, oh, okay, wait, I can't. Nobody can win anymore. There's nothing else to discover here. I'm over this. Right. And magic medigames get solved at some point or stabilize at least where everyone is playing the same six-dex or what have you.

And sometimes that's because they are the best six-dex. And sometimes that's just because you've reached a local. maximum of where these decks happen to settle such that a new deck can find so hard to get in or people just have enough momentum that they don't want to find some new. And if the game never had any more sets, then they might get boring, like you say, and eventually die down. And it's a blessing that TCGs and deck building games get to make more sets and livening things up and change the rules again and make people get back to that learning mode that's so fun.

And it's obviously great for their ability to support game designers making more games and that those business models are both places where players are overdored to get new content. They're excited to buy some new. You're excited to shake things up. And it feels very, like, player-friendly to release new stuff. So we're talking about me growing up playing games, and then I was playing magic sort of casually in high school. And then I got to Harvard, and I found some people there. They were playing, like, very, very seriously.

And Cambridge was the place where your move games was, where you yourself were a rising star, and a magic champion that was keeping a lot of renown. And I started playing magic more seriously with people at Harvard and also at year-move games and trying to get on the pro tour. And they were trying to be serious about how the game worked, figuring out the physics of the game, figuring out how to win. And that was very exciting to me.

I love competing and starting to play PTQs was a blast. And I guess I won three PTQs and played three pro tours in the year 2000. and then I got my master's degree in computer science from Harvard, and then I was kind of figuring out what to do next, and game design had never seemed like a viable career path. It didn't even cross my mind. And it's funny that one of the games I played in as a kid, I found it again recently.

It's called File 13, and it was included in Dragon Magazine as sort of like a giveaway game once in a time. And it's a game about making games and about how games move through the production pipeline. And the joke is that at any stage in the design, production pipeline, the game can be trash. You go to File 13 with just the garbage. And so in early concepting, in mechanical design, in graphical layout, in publisher review, and all these different stages, the game can just get ruined. You're trying to like push a ton of

games in this pipeline and hope that some come out. And it's kind of a funny commentary that is all too true about the ways games can get canceled. But the thing that stuck out to me as a kid was that in the playtesting phase, they had a throwaway joke that playtesters get paid. paid by being listed in credits, but that, you know, you can't eat the credits. And so most playtexers just, like, dying and cardboard box, like, starving to death. And in my head, I was like, oh, that sounds awful. I don't want to do that. Like, I can't, you know, if I try to make games, I'll just like die in cardboard box.

I'll never have a family. I'll never send a college. And later in life, when I eventually got to game companies, I was shocked to find that people had families, like they had kids, they had kids, they had kids to college, like, that it was viable. And that wasn't on my radar at all in that era. And so by told happenstance, after my master's was over and I was looking around, my mom told me that my cousin was the nanny for Richard Garfield, who famously invented Match of the Gathering. And she was like, yeah, she should like go and meet him some time.

And I was like, oh, mom, like, I can't, I can't be that guy. I can't just go meet him and be like a band boy. Like people often are kind of embarrassed to you and drag to celebrities. And my mom's like, no, like, seriously, you have to meet him. Like, you love this game. I was like, okay, fine. And so I met Richard. He's like super, super cool.

I really wanted to impress him. And he's like, oh, I should come out, play board games with my friend sometime. And I was like, oh, my God, this is my dream going through. Like, don't freak out, don't freak out. And so I was living in Seattle for the summer. And I started going around playing board games and his friends. And again, I'm like desperate to impress him. And it was fun.

We had a good time. And eventually I sort of like got my courage up to sort of send him a package of here's why I think I can deliver a lot of value. like helping you guys make magic sense. Like here's what I can do for you. And here's some examples of what I think I could do to help your company achieve his goals. And he passed on to Bill Rose. And then by total chance again, they had an internship.

Hold on. Let me pause you for one second. Yeah. So you get your, your cousin is Richard Garfield's nanny. And you get this in. And then that is super intimidating to be able to make this, you know, initial conversation. and be able to approach him as a hero. This is something I hear all of the time

and exactly the same sort of thing that you said, not only is Richard great, but almost everybody in this industry is very welcoming, very approachable, and that everybody that's out there that's like, I can't do that. I couldn't step up and kind of try to talk to talk to my heroes and talk to the companies that matter to me. You step up and do that.

That's a huge thing, and it almost always works out well. And if it doesn't work out well, and for some reason, whoever you approach is a jerk, don't let that stop. You go to the next. person because you're never going to be able to get that next step. You're never going to be able to make something happen if you're not willing to put yourself out there.

And if you approach it in a kind way and a, you know, and are nice, people are going to be nice to you. So I just want to sort of underscore that message because I think that's really important. Yeah, I totally agree. And I've heard that in your other podcast episodes of people having those opportunities and jumping on them and having it work out. You know, Paul Peterson's mentioned the day. He like literally had a similar opportunity with Richard Garfield.

So Richard Garfield's a patron state in many ways. Yeah, well, I am, I'm hearing a few stories about Richard Garfield specifically bringing people into the game design. And I'm afraid that I'm going to send a bunch of people to Richard's house right now. Yeah, I'd mean to get him, get him stock. No, no, no. But I did. I also wanted to follow up on, you said, and then you, like, presented him with like a, like a resume or like a document of like, here's why you should hire me. Like, what went down there?

So I was thinking, like, oh, someday I should try to like maybe finagle a job out of this. but I was still a little scared. And then I was avidly reading the magicgathering.com articles by magic. Eventually I would end up writing them, but at the time I was reading them, and there was a Bueller article. Randy Bueller was writing the latest development's column at the time when I would later inherit, and he posted their vapor ops test, which is how they evaluated new candidates who wanted to work on magic.

And just kind of as a fun article, he said, here's the test, you know, post your results in the comments or something. And this was like terrifying to me because I thought, oh no, I've been trying to get ready to pitch them why should hire me. And this test is going to make like a hundred thousand people take the test and send their results there and say hire me. And I had like maybe not much competition before this test came up. And now I have like infinite competition and I've missed my shot and it's all over and I've been an idiot and I've ruined everything. It was not a great feeling. But I channeled that and saying, okay, well, I certainly can't wait a week longer than this to make my moment.

And so I took the test and did as good a job as I could and included that in the sort of packet I sent of how I thought I could add value. And I made some other arguments as well for how I thought I could help them. And as lucky as it was to have met Richard through that random connection, it was also very lucky that they had a slot that had just opened up. Well, I guess I didn't hear any back for three, four, six months, and then they had a slot open up, and then they reached back out to me. and I ended up getting a six-month internship out of that and eventually they hired me full-time and I was at Wizards more than five years and eventually was the lead final designer of Lorwyn

and Shards of Alara and played her chaos on the development side and eventually became the head of Velware Magic and just had a great experience there where a lot of magic tests, a lot of other TGs and it was a dreamgoon true. I'm still very, very grateful. That's awesome.

And then since we are Are there what you found your dream job? You got in, you became the head of magic. What would make you leave such a dream job? So Wizards did a bunch of digital games and spent a lot of money on them that at the time didn't really work out. They had a bunch of layoffs across the company. I was wrapped up in that. And so I got laid off that way.

And it seemed like a horrible, horrible event at the time. It was very dishearting. I never been laid off before. It was my first job, essentially. eventually it did work out for the best, as people often say, but it sure didn't seem the way at the time. But my next job was helping make the Marvel Superhero Squad MMO for kids through Gazillion, and they hired me in there to make the video game, but I pitched them on making a

trading card game in the MMO, a digital trading card game, which is something that they were already very open to. And I made my prototype, and I pitched it through. There's some of the submissions, but mine, was the one that was taken. And so I became sort of product owner of a team of six-state people sort of making the digital card game

inside that video game. And so it's a way for me to sort of like parlay my trading card game knowledge into making video games. And that was a theme that recurred because I guess Upper Deck published a paper version of the Superhero Squad,

Barple trading card game. And I'm missing the connections that way and they put a bunch of target stores and the codes to unlock things in the MMO. And then once the MMO shifts, six of us split off and did a startup. We eventually ran out of money before we finished the video game we were trying to make.

And then Upper Deck reached out to me and said, hey, we have the Marvel license for making card games. We kind of want to make a deck building game. It's a category's heating up. Who do you know that will be good at this? And I like, crack my knuckles. I'm like, let me tell you who I think would be good at this. And I like pitch them on why I think, you know,

they should hire me. And I guess with that in the Garfield thing, like it's very lucky in both cases that some of those opportunities opened up, but I also tried to really take it seriously and crush these opportunities when they came up. If I was not going to get many shots like this, I didn't want to squander them,

and I wanted to take every angle I could in terms of working hard, thinking about what they would like to see, and thinking about what I could bring to the table to sort of get them to agree to pick me. Sure, yeah. The chance favors the prepared, right? We all have these sort of various opportunities that come up in our lives and the people that are willing to put in the work and really be ready for that and do what it takes are the ones that get to, you know, get to the next level and open up new opportunities. Right.

And like going to Wizards, the opportunity, like meeting Richard was chance, but after some reluctance, I did jump on talking to him and like trying to learn about his world. And then the work I'd done like getting on the pro tour helped me to get the job. the work I'd done learning about mathematics and computer science, probability, game theory, decision theory helped me to get that job. And so it wasn't just sort of luck, although that's a lot of it. And, you know, I have sort of a lot of privilege and unearned advantages going into it. But, you know, the deck-building game opportunity for upper deck was also leveraging them being happy with the trading card game I'd made that they'd poured into paper a couple years earlier. Right. So there was a lot of stuff in your, uh, in this part of your

story I really want to dig into. And principles, I'm sure we can talk about for hours. But the jump from, you know, head of design and magic where, you know, you're working on paper magic and it's, you know, almost a very sort of pure design role to being, running a digital team building a digital trading hard game. What was that, what was that transition like? Were you, you, you know, what was you, you were managing the programmers there? Were you just managing design?

What was happening? I wasn't a people manager. And I guess, like, I was the head developer magic, like where Rosewater was the head designer just to sort of like make sure I don't get angry letters. I started without running a feature team. I was just a designer on the overall. I appreciate you highlighting the difference. For people that don't know the difference between a head developer and a head designer, how would you describe that difference? I guess back in the day, Magic says were split into an initial design phase where designers tried to be very explorers.

ambitious, aggressive about doing new things that the game had never done before, and then they would make as sort of cool a flight of fancy as they could, and then pass it off to a development team that would take it to make sure it played really well. They'd play the hell of it, how the mechanics weren't working well, sand off the ones that were kind of working well, and polish the ones that were working well, and then just make sure that it played well in limited and constructed, that it was curved well, that it would be good for casual and franchise players,

and that it would sort of like stand the test of time to be played, like the millions of times matches that he's played. And you said that that's how it used to work. Is that that changed now? And do you think that there's a value to that system as it was set up? I'm no longer an expert in how they do things. It's been a long time since I was there. I was there from 03 to 08.

But I believe that there is now an initial sort of vision team and then a set design team and then a play design team that sort of break it up to three parts instead of two. I don't want to try to make too many claims about how it works because I'm not as perfect. It's all good. I mostly just wanted to clarify and then even I sort of I break down design principles marginally differently, but definitely there's engine design versus component design. There's development design versus development and the focus shifts a lot.

And so you were primarily focused on the sort of development side, just sort of making that, making sure everything is balanced and plays well and that the, you know, what's happening is actually being shown through, not necessarily setting the vision per se, but making sure that that vision actually gets realized. Yeah, and they had a bunch of people there that were, you know, pro tour winners like you yourself are, which is awesome, and we're just like experts at crushing magic tournaments and knowing the details of balancing cards. And I wasn't quite at that level. I'd been on some pro dors, I certainly had won any. He didn't perform great any of the ones that I played in. And so I sort of swore at it. And so I sort of

switch back and forth between the initial design teams and the development teams, or eventually they call them final design teams to sort of clarify that it was still game design that was happening there that they weren't like computer game developers. And so I was probably on 10 initial design teams for magic and then 10 development slash final design teams. And I enjoyed both sides of it. And there were some people that kind of multi-class and switch back and forth and some people that were great at finding innovative new things to do, but weren't necessarily great at like making things play really well for different groups over time if that makes sense yeah no well i mean certainly i mean you know i went from being a sort of pro tour player to working on games and that meant

that i was you know i could find where the things were were broken and degenerate but i didn't know how to design like that that you don't know that skill just because you're good at playing games uh right and so actually that's where i had to start you know studying and learning and trying to figure everything out that it was hilarious to me that I already had that job when, you know, I had no idea how to do it. But it was, that's sort of what led, ended up led to the book and this podcast is like, hey, you know, these, these are really valuable principles. And I wish somebody would just like put them in a way that I could have understood

back then without having to go through it, figure it out the hard way it launched so many bad games. That's funny. And like, and I agree with you that they are different skill sets. And it's hard to self-teach them. And it's awesome this podcast. book are sort of helping people out there that interest to this topic teach themselves and learn for you and your colleagues and sort of get to the higher level. Getting into a corporation

making board games or video games is very hard, but once you get there, it's a great way to learn because you've so many colleagues that have done it longer than you, that have different perspectives, that are different talents, and you can learn from them. And I learned a ton about making games in general at Wizards and at all the video game companies since then, and compared to what I could have learned just working solo on game design or if I worked at a consulting company during the day on related topics and tried to do games at night

and didn't have that sort of trial by fire, trial by who knows what, of having a million people tell you this is what you're doing that's good and that's what you're doing that's not good and you should do better. That was a huge benefit sort of throughout my career. Oh, absolutely. I mean, honestly, as much as I'm trying to be helpful

with both the book and the podcast, there's only so much that that can do. Surrounding yourself with smart people that are trying to solve the same problems as you or have already solved the same problems as you, mentorship, deadlines, those things like real accountability, those things are invaluable and incredibly important

and can accelerate your process of learning from years to months in a way that I don't know anything else that can. Right. And as some of your guests have also said, if you're not in the position to sort of be in an organization in that's making, games where people can kind of all be teaching each other, making each other better.

Then finding your own communities, building your own communities, where people can teach each other is hugely helpful. And people who talked about different playtest groups that they're in. I live in Seattle, so this place is just like, lousy with game designers, it's just crawling with them. You know, if you throw a cat, you will hit three game designers in Seattle. But I get to go to Paul Peterson's board game sort of design and playtesting group, and that's very helpful and a great resource.

A lot of folks here have their own groups. in which they play their games and get feedback about them. And they learn a lot that way. And I'll definitely encourage that out there to look for similarly minded folks, you know, organize through the internet and get those groups together. Find your tribe, find people that will pull you up and that will challenge you. Those are the best basic tips for growing and being happy in life. Right.

So after, and so I made what became legendary the Marvel Deck Builder game for Upper Deck. I've continued to make expansions that since then. I think it came out in like 2012 or something. And I think there's 20 sets of it on the shelves that I've done all the design for. There's a bunch of spin-off brands that I did not do the content for, but are using the same engine or a related engine for Alien and Predator and Buffy and the X-Files and James Bond is coming out. There's a big trouble and little China.

So there's like a bunch of boxes out. It was very, very gratified to see. and then I got a job at Pop Cap, which is part of electronic arts in Seattle, as a creative director, and I initially worked on sort of Facebook games there when that was a thing. It was like a very brief flashing panel,

Facebook games were very, very hot, and they were very very not once mobile games on phones started to be a coming big thing. And then I started pitching PopCap on making a digital trading card game because if you leave in a room too long, without enough stuff to do, I will make a digital trading card game.

and so Plants versus Zombies is one of the biggest brands of Popcat and it's a great fit to trading card games in a lot of ways because there's certain properties in IP that make them a good fit to trading card games versus not and I started sort of making a paper prototype. Why don't you talk a little bit about that? What makes a property good fit for trading card game versus bad fit for a trading card game design? I have a list that I could bring up but off the top of my head one important thing is that you need to have a lot of characters in that like Conan is an IP that people have heard of, but the characters be named from the Conan IP are like Conan and maybe Red Sonia and maybe there's a couple of bad guys

and like that's it. Whereas something like Transformers has like hundreds of characters in it. And that makes it a better fit. Another thing is that you want to have characters in the IP that are very different power levels from each other so you can make cards in the TCG

that are very different parallels from each other. And so if you are If the IP you want to use is medieval French infantry warfare, then the different medieval French infantrymen probably aren't that different room which for other than power level. If there's no dragon, there's no tank, there's no spaceship, there's no Thanos that stands head and shoulders over the other ones that can be sort of like a powerful piece in the game that would dominate the others in a cool way. it helps to have different factions in TCGs and so if the IP has different factions that's extremely helpful it is challenging if your IP has a strict good versus evil lineup where it always has to be light side versus dark side or it always has to be a versus B it's easier if the factions are a little more intermixed where in something like magic you can have all the factions or colors I should say

kind of ebbing and flowing and being united and divided by different characters. There's other bolts I have a list in where things that make IPs, good fits, or DCD, so those small ones that come to mind. But Planters for zombies benefits from a lot of that. There's a lot of awesome characters. They're different power levels. It does have a strong good versus evil.

The name of brand is literally Plans for Zombies. But I tried to make that a strength and really lean into that asymmetry and make a TECD that was very asymmetrical, where one side is always plants, one side is always zombies, and they do not function at all the same way. Even the turn structure is not symmetrical, and it's interwoven in a way that makes, really evokes the differences between those two sides.

But anyway, I took the paper prototype, started showing around to some folks getting their feedback, made it better, showed the four folks, got feedback, made it better, showed the eight folks, got the feedback, made it better. And because it was kind of like a secret black ops project that no one in Popgap had commissioned me to do, I was just like doing it in my evening hours,

The buzz started going around. There was like a hot new secret project that people should like, you know, find the right people to ask about. And they eventually gave me an intern programmer to help me make a digital prototype and sort of try to prove out how that would look. And the intern I got was like a superstar, this guy, Ranjong, who's just like a mirror worker and a great programmer, even though he was very young at the time. I was still in college. And we achieved all our goals very rapidly. We made a lot more features than we ever thought we would in the sort of three months we had. and then we pitched Pop Kappa making it for real.

They gave us eight people to make a fancy prototype. We made a fancy prototype. We started pitching EA. And there were a lot of bumps and adventures along the way, but eventually we shipped Planets through Zombies Heroes, which is a digital trading card game on Android and iOS phones that is live right now and is super awesome, and I'm really proud of.

And now I'm working on something new over Popka. Very exciting. I yeah that's pretty amazing so yeah that taking that initiative seems to be a very recurring theme in your in your career and uh you know forcing uh your way into uh building trading card games or digital trading card games regardless of what else uh people are doing is phenomenal uh and uh i think the um the process it's funny yeah you you know having the rock star developer is uh is so game changing like i've i've been worked with a lot of development teams and worked on a couple digital trading card games.

And the difference of you have somebody who's really, really good at engineering and development versus someone who's just good is 10x. The amount you can do something is crazy. And then learning how to communicate with them and be able to build things for digital teams is a completely different world than when you're sort of building tabletop stuff. Yeah, it's crazily different, the two worlds.

But they certainly have a lot of commonality. And in Seattle, there are tons of video game companies. There are tons of board game designers. I wouldn't necessarily say tons of companies, but more here than any other city. And there's a ton of crossover as a result. And you can see this sort of Seattle game design aesthetic being heavily influenced by board games even when it is video games. So if you, well, there are some principles that jump to mind that you'd say were either crossover or things that changed dramatically when you go from working on a tabletop game and working on a digital game? the biggest thing is the size of the team

the games that I've worked on digitally have had teams that are not just my feature but the whole project has been from like as small as six to as large as a hundred and the amount of communication you have to do between 100 people and get everybody on the same page

about what you're building and why and what you're changing why is just incredibly difficult do you have best practices like that you use to communicate what's worked what's what maybe what's a story of a failure of communication and how you solved the problem? There are certainly different scopes of communication where there's some things that your pod or feature needs to know and needs to communicate with each other on a day-to-day basis,

on an hour-to-hour basis, that you can't spread across 100 people, and so you sort of have to find the right size of folks to work on each part of the game, and then make sure that they are very closely knit, that they're sitting right next to each other, talking every morning, that they're in-sessioning each other all day. And then there are, you know, larger groups of related features. You have four features that need to interact closely. And so they need to have representatives talk to each other, but not every single person of every single pod, talk to each other all the time.

And there are some things that are on the product level that all 100 people need to know, but you don't necessarily need all 100 people to talk to all 100 or other people in other ways. And so the communication is sort of a fundamental challenge of, large organizations in the world. Like, it's a very unsolved problem. If corporations knew how to communicate effectively, they would all be a lot more productive.

But I think all the companies I've been to struggle with that, including the tabletop ones and other industries, my impression is that they struggle with it too. We're all still figuring that out. If you know, if you know the answer, let me know. Yeah, well, I think the classic problem of human coordination at scale, I don't think is one that we're going to solve necessarily on this. podcast. But it's an interesting challenge and it's obviously, you know, it's a sort of meta game

design in its own right. You know, like you're trying to build systems that allow people to work together better and, you know, create the right level of communication. So everybody knows enough about what other people are doing, but not so much bureaucracy and burden that your time is now all getting taken up by meetings or that you're, you know, crushing the sort of individual things. Right, right. The specific idea of having these sort of small pods, you know, because in reality, and I found this, you know, if you want to make, you know, design a game, right, and come up with new ideas, at the point where your team is more than five-ish people, you're not getting any new ideas.

In fact, you're going to degrade the quality of the ideas from that group. Interesting. And we've done work with the Wharton School of Business and we've, you know, reached a lot of research on creativity and teams. And in fact, very often literally just as soon as you start adding every person, you start degrading the ideas of each person individually. And there are steps you can take to avoid that where you, you know, force people to sort of individually ideate. And then you start bringing in groups and diverse opinions in the right sort of way.

And that can then, then you do increase the number of ideas and the quality of the ideas. But it's a very real problem because you have group think that fits in that starts to stink in. You have like people will self-censor because they don't want to look stupid. There's a lot of problems. And, you know, to be able to hold all those different ideas in mind so that you, you can create new combinations, it gets harder and harder to the higher, the larger you scale, the group. So even if you want to coordinate 100 people to design the best thing you can, you need to be breaking them up into small pods and assigning to specific things if you want

to actually get high value out of them. Yeah, I think that's a really good points. And I agree that you should never just like, well, you should typically not bring eight people into room and say, let's brainstorm something on this topic and just all start writing ideas on whiteboard. And instead you should say, everybody take 20 minutes ahead of time and brainstorm individually, write down all your ideas in this Google Doc or have you, and then we'll get in a room and process them all because you'll get a lot more output from each person than if you have to have people in a room waiting for their turn to speak or getting intimidated because they're afraid their ideas will look stupid or it's just not their turn or something like that. And so I definitely agree that there are things you can do, as you say, to sort of like try to increase the idea of quality and quantity in those cases. Yeah, no, exactly. So the game I co-developed with Wharton is called The Breakthrough Game, and it basically forces that process.

So you'll figure out what is the problem we want to solve. You'll prep ahead of time. You'll write your own ideas on individual cards. Then we sort of force you to get out of your comfort zone by giving you these warp cards that make you, okay, what would your idea look like if it cost a million dollars, or what would your idea look like if it was for children? Or what would, you know, like sort of forcing you to like think outside the box a bit

on your own and then you take all the cards shuffle them together start dealing them out and then recombining them with other people so that it creates this forced uh you know now you start generating even new ideas collectively but you don't lose the ones that you would have come out with from your own your own deep psyche that sounds really cool i want to want to play the game the uh one example of sort of like uh decision making or brainstorming technology that i don't think i had when i was at wizards i'm sure the technology in um you know generating creative ideas and evaluating them is better now that it was when I was there just because 11 years had passed in 2008.

But at the time, I think we were like at the stage of having a design team make card ideas for some purpose and then evaluating them, I feel like we were all writing things at our desks and then sending them in and then somebody would stitch them to get into file, we'd meet the room and go over the cards to file and talk about what we did and didn't like about them. And that's a fine sort of baseline way to proceed at the time, but both. what we've done when making new units, we're making new cards at Popcap is to have people submit their idea.

First, we'll meet establish our criteria. What are the goals of what we're trying to submit here? What we want this unit to achieve that we're all going to submit ideas to do? And maybe we say, oh, we're going to make a new wall in PVC Heroes, and it has to be different than all the other walls made. It has to be epic rarity, which is the third highest rarity out of four. And we don't want to have the same sun-caused any of the walls out there.

And we want to make sure that it's good against this, this zombie threat that's been especially powerful recently. And we'll try to find as many goals as we can and define them, because that sort of puts constraints on you, as many of the folks have said, that breed not just creativity, but also can kind of just make the correct solution materialize. Like once you have, you know, 12 constraints on what you need this card to do,

what you need this unit to do, you're kind of done already. Like sometimes the solution is staring you right in face because you're like, well, the cost can't be two, three, five or six and it can't have this property of that property. It must be doing those other things.

And sometimes it's like the answer is right in front of you. Like you've chipped away all the Marvel except for, you know, Michelangelo is David or something and you have the answer right there. Or at least you're close enough that four people submitting can submit 24 things that will at some point hit on the head. But anyway, we will submit things offline into a shared Google Oxenware or other

similar spreadsheet. And then we'll vote on them independently without knowledge of other people's votes. And we'll log all of our votes into the software in a way that blacks out the cell automatically after you log your rating in the cell. And so you have your own column where you put your ratings. There's rows or your cards. You're writing, you know, three, four, five, three, two, one of how much you think the card is good. Sometimes we separate on humor versus mechanics because we're trying to make sort of, you know, comedic games for plants for zombies.

And then we'll get in the room and we can sort by those initial ratings. and that's not the end of story. The vote doesn't rule the day by itself, but it gives us a starting place of, we don't have to talk about these cards are in the bottom half. Like, just skip that whole part, and you save a lot of time

by not bothering to value the ideas that everyone collectively has decided or bad, and the old technology of getting a room, go through the cards one by one in the order to submit it and talk about why they're good or bad, you'd have to, like, spend a lot of time talking about cards

that in reality nobody ever thought we're good in the first place. And if the card gets a terrible rating and someone really wants to fight for, they can bring it up and fight for it and talk about it, even though it got a horrible rating. Because sometimes there's something else that everyone didn't see, and it's worth talking about it after all.

But we've saved a lot of time. Yeah, there's, so I think those are great principles. There's two other things that come to mind as I'm listening to that. One is, you know, talking about bad ideas is often a great thing for spawning new, weird, good ideas. You know, I try to encourage, you know, my team. I'd rather you submit 20 ideas to me, and one of them turns out to be a real winner than, if you submitted five ideas and we never got anywhere. You know, that now obviously you have to balance that with how much time you're going to spend on each one.

But, you know, the creative process being willing to kind of look stupid or say something like, and I, you know, often sort of purpose. I'm like, okay, I don't think this works, but what about that kind of direction? Right. And then somebody would be like, no, that doesn't work. But what if you did this? Now all of a sudden you start moving down a path. And you're like, oh, okay, cool. We never would have thought of that if we didn't start this stupid thing.

Totally. I started saying. Yeah, yeah. And often in the room, you end up picking none of the cards are submitted, but you kind of frank and sign something out of elements you like out of different cards or somebody says, just like you're saying, oh, I like that part, but what if it did this? And it's like, oh, yeah, that's cool. And you kind of like collectively get somewhere that you didn't start. You know, approach these things as kind of the improv like yes and, you know, like, all right, this is the part. This is the principle that's good, but let's try this. All right. How about this? And then the other thing is like I, there's a principle. I think I originally I think I heard this from just. Jeff Bezos that sort of talked about, you know, how do you know when a project, you know, they do all kinds of crazy projects, all different types. Like, some of them work, some of them don't.

How do you know, like, when to kill it and how do you know when you're still, like, innovating? Right. And his principle was, as long as there's somebody that I really trust, like, one of our, like, top people that's still, like, fighting for it, we're going to keep going. You know, if somebody that is really, really wants to push a thing and, like, see it through and they're willing to, like, drive that bus. Okay, we're going to keep seeing if we can figure something out.

But, and then, you know, it might take years, but you can kind of see, you know, trust people that they're going to, they're going to keep pushing and try to find a solution. And I try to encourage that as well, even if I'm like, man, you've been working on this a long time. And I think this is really dumb. But, you know, eventually they get to something good. And that's, it's awesome because, you know, a lot of my ideas seem dumb and crazy. And people thought they were that. And now, now I have a company and make games for a living. Yeah, yeah.

Popcap has a history of that as well where, uh, when Peggle was. made. It was originally two people in a corner working on like some crazy idea about a bouncing ball. And they were just prototyping for like a year and a half or something. And they like nothing to show for it. Everyone's like, what are those guys doing over there? But the company had enough trust them that they're just like, yep, keep taking paychecks, keep, you know, this figure stuff out a year and a half and it's not fun yet. But then eventually it became fun and then it became amazing. And then Peggle was like a huge achievement for Popcap. And organizations can't always afford to spend that much money and time and try. And organizations can't always afford to

spend that much money and time and trust on a couple of folks with a dream, but sometimes they can, and sometimes EA and Pop Cap having able to do so, and PC Heroes was sort of example of that as well, and so that's awesome when, you know, they have the ability to do what you're saying, and what I guess Jeff is saying, or buddy Jeff, that they can afford to just back somebody to trust and let them kind of like go off their own course direction. Yeah, and you, you know, so you have startup experience and you know there is this reality of okay we only have so many resources to spend and if you're amazon that number is much much higher um uh and ea and uh obviously pop cap are similarly very high uh that there's they can they can sort of spend more uh but i think

in general you know you you should always be spending 10 percent to 20 percent of your resources on just kind of the crazy moonshouty stuff that you never know what's going to come of it um and figure it out from there. I mean, certainly if you, like, even 10% might be out of read for some folks, but I certainly agree with you. And in people's own lives, if they can spend 10% of their time on board game design

that's somebody interested in, then that's obviously, can be enough. Yeah, and if it starts small than that, it's like, hey, you know what, I got 20 minutes a day, that's all I got to start working. Okay, great.

You know how much further you're going to be in a year than somebody that didn't spend that time or 10 years? You know, it's, those things add up. And so I often, I do try to emphasize that for people too because, you know, not everybody's as lucky as they can't, you know, do this full time. But if you want, if it's something that's important to you, investing at least sometime in it is pretty critical. And just think about things in the car, in the shower, on the bus, a lot of my breakthroughs have happened in those places. And sometimes I just like have something in the back burner.

And I know I generally want to solve it, but I'm not, I'm not actively working on it right now, but I'm listening to music or something. and the answer start to pop in and like some part of your brain is figure it out kind of, you know, in another task. Yes, well, that kind of creativity, what I've heard, referred to, I like the expression, bud, bath, or bus,

or, sorry, bed, bath or bus, as the things that sort of like can kick in your creative memory that, like, I've left, you know, I've left the environment I'm in, I'm sleeping, I'm traveling, those things can kind of really get you to let go and make connections you didn't make before. But to be successful at that,

to have those eureka moments, you have to have done the work beforehand. You have to sort of fill your head with the problem and the details of the problem and then you may not be able to solve it while you're pounding away at your keyboard, but then your brain will continue to process those things, as you said, on the back burner, and that can unlock some pretty amazing ideas. I have a moped in my shower for when those ideas show up. That's funny. You don't just have to like, you know, draw with soap on the wall, like a couple of crude backgrounds. That gets creepy. Yeah, yeah. There was a,

There was a marker thing that you could write on the walls that I tried, but that looked like it was like a murder scene or something. It was not okay. So now I have a little notepad that's waterproof. It was less a beautiful mind, more psycho. No, it wasn't quite cutting it. Another, I just want to say, another key thing about companies that are trying to let people explore

and kind of go off on a limb a little bit is that I think it's really important to do so at a low fidelity level and make sure that they're like using a pencil and not like using 10 engineers to build something and try to fade out if that'll be fun, only discover that it's not. And a lot of the times that Popcap has gotten into trouble over the years has been when they ramped up too early and had an idea they were excited about. And instead of having two people work on that corner for a year, they said, here are 20 engineers and 10 artists build this.

And then as they're building and they're figuring it out, ooh, actually that part it wasn't good, but we spent six months and tons of money building it, we have to throw it out and do something else. But the costs are very real at that scale. And so even having learned this lesson, we still kind of stumbled sometimes and overcommit too early to projects because we get excited about them and want to get them out there. But it has been a bitter pill to swallow sometimes that we have too early gone to a high fidelity level. with working code to explore an idea instead of just having a couple of folks and some prototypes or some paper prototypes that can more easily discover what is wrong. Yeah, there's two great lessons in there.

I want to underscore you. One is like even if you want to be making, you know, digital games, figuring out how to be able to prototype those things in paper form is is incredibly invaluable. And basically that the second be just the name of the game is how many iteration cycles do you get before you run out of gas, right? So if your burn rate is two people or just kind of your spare time. If you're hanging out at home, then you can get a lot of iterations in if you're keeping your cost to iterate low. You're just going to get things.

If it's just changing a piece of paper, it's very different than saying, hey, I need you to recode this level or recode this engine. And so it's absolutely critical. And we spent a year in, you know, doing when we were doing SoulForge, we spent a year just doing paper prototyping before we had. even hired a programmer. And then, you know, we scaled up pretty fast. And it, you know, all of a sudden it's like, okay, well, no, now my burn rate is 10x what it was last month. Now that, that changes the equation a lot.

And you've got to move a lot faster. And if you get it wrong, well, that's the end of that. So I've learned that lesson the hard way myself. So, yeah. And with the, I like what you said about the number of iterations you can achieve before you ran out of time being linked to the quality, and I guess you mentioned on the book as well, I heard somebody saying at a GDC talk or something

that they love investing in tools to help the builds propagate more quickly and to help QA run their passes more quickly because it reduces the time that it takes to get your new software after you made the change and make sure that it's working, make sure that it's playing well, and that if it takes you like two days to build out a new version after you made your change, then the number of iterations you get is vastly decreased versus it takes 20 minutes.

Yeah, 100%. And I have actually invested a fair amount in, even though I mostly do tabletop games, like I have built custom tools to better and more quickly prototype and iterate on those because it's like, yeah, if I can save even 10% time, you know, that adds up dramatically over several years. And often the difference is much, much greater than that. And that's where I tell people like, you know, even if you're at home and prototyping, like use the tools that are around you,

like use decks of cards, write down things with marker, like take a game that already exists. And, you know, this may be a decent transition into talking about deck building games. Because like when I first came up with the idea for Ascension, I had, I set a Dominion.

I was like, oh, man, I wish these cards came out in a more varied way. And I, just, for the first time, I just shuffled the Dominion deck together and dealt it out and see what happens. Right.

And, you know, obviously it's not a totally great experience, but it was enough to get me to say, like, okay, this might work. And now I can iterate much faster. and before I'm going to invest time and building a whole card file, et cetera. Yeah, and in terms of rapid iterations,

like the one place I think I would differ from a lot of tabletop designers is that I often see people bringing prototypes to playtesting group sessions that are just like Times New Roman fonts on some paper that they cut up. And I think like doing stuff for yourself, it helps keep your iterations faster

to have no art, to have no graph design, to just have words in a card to have terrible card names, have stupid concepts for the different elements in the game. But once you bring it even to the level of eight acquaintances at a group playtest in session, I feel like I get better, more clear feedback when I include a decent graphic design, I include some art and elements.

I try to think about vaguely reasonable metaphors the cards and not just call them like attacker-defender support because it's hard for people to like, sort of see what makes the game fun and what it even is when there's no artist's words. Like when I play a prototype and it's just fonts on a card, I get bored, it's hard for me to attach to it. Like, theme is so important to me in game design that when there's no theme at all or the themes intentionally stupid with sort of like very bad playtest names on purpose, then that is

enough to kind of bounce me out of it and make it hard for me to have fun with it. And so even though it makes iteration times longer to have art of graphic design, I try to do that with their prototypes. I'm going to show other people. If I'm just for myself. I don't know how to. Yeah, well, I wouldn't, I wouldn't disagree with that. I think it's just a matter of like, you know, at what rate do you scale, right? When do you move from? So, like, you know, if you were working with, it's one of the reasons why I love having a lot of great game designer friends and people that I work with that are, you know, they can see past all that stuff. So I can do a few iterations with that group before it has to start looking pretty. And then, yeah, if I'm going to start showing it to friends and acquaintances, I got to, you know, at least, you know, make some efforts to, you know, making, telling the story here. and then over time, it'll, all right, now we're going to invest in some real art or, you know, now we're going to look at, you know, okay, what is this really, what's really happening here?

So I think it's just about as you become more confident in your core design assumptions, you can scale up. And sometimes you have to scale up faster, right? If somebody's listening to this and they don't have any game designers or any community of people that can, like, help you at a, you know, looking at Times New Roman on paper, then, yeah, you will have and often have to invest more in your prototypes up front so that you can get feedback. that's proper. And, you know, sometimes you can sort of filter the feedback a little bit and see where people are, you know, the problem would be solved if there was good art, but, but sometimes there's no choice but to actually put it on there. Right. And as you say, the people that are very close to you and you trust really well, it's a little easier to give them no art or not much. And the people that you don't know as well, they kind of need a little more help to trust you enough to get into a trust you enough that this will be fun or might have a, have a prayer being fun.

the people you don't know as well need a little more art to kind of get them into it. And just one more thing about the length of iteration cycles, a huge challenge in making mobile games for phones is that a lot of them have medigames that last a long time. You want people to be in these games as a service for months and for years and you want to have them have a cool ramp of things they unlock, things that they achieve,

things as they earn, things as they acquire, kind of on that pathway that can last years. And that includes different cycles of gameplay that lasts five minutes, the last an hour, the last three days, last a month, the last different lengths of time. And testing those different lengths of time

and figuring out their fun is very, very hard and almost impossible. Like the number of iterations you get on, hey, is this game fun to play from the time you install it to a year later, is like zero iterations from the time you make the game, the time you publish it? You're kind of crossing fingers and comparing to existing games in the marketplace that you think of good year-long meta games and saying, like, we think we're doing that or we're doing our version of that. Is that good enough? We hope so. We've never got the chance to test it as a real person would with the final version from day zero to day 366. And so it's tough to make that fun. And sometimes by the time you realize that the first month of gameplay doesn't fit together well or it was in pace well, you know, many, many months have gone by. And it's very challenging.

I'm kind of surprised to hear that there's not like beta groups that you run through some of those experiences before you go full. You do, but the problem is that it's changing throughout that whole time they're testing it. And so even over the course of the month that the beta tester has the game, it's a very different game at the end of the month that it was at the beginning because you furiously changing features and changing content as you go. And so by the time they get to the end of three months of playing with it, is a different game that it was at the start.

Sometimes so much so you almost have to throw it out and start a new group. Like it's ever changing so the tests aren't accurate. Interesting. And when you're talking about building a year-long metagame in the products, mobile products, you know, I'm immediately thinking of like a magic metagame with new cards releasing and people competing against each other. Is it sort of similar?

Or what are the things that, like, create a metagame in a mobile process that lasts a year ahead of time? I guess what I mean is if you think about somebody playing Clash or Clash or Clans or Clash Real, there are new units. are unlocking through play a year into it. And so is that unit valuable to someone who's been playing the game for a year? It's hard to tell without actually playing the game yourself for a year on the exact same path that the finished product will lead people on.

And so that's almost impossible to test because the product is changing as you go. And so it's not as much like in the way Magic releases new sets and that's a meta game. I mean more why does the player want to pick up the game again? on day 300, as opposed to switch to another mobile game instead. And a lot of the times the answer to that is they have long-term goals they're trying to achieve. They have a community they're involved in. They have friends or guild to play the game with them that they want to support that

are depending on them. And it's hard to test all those things in the context of a development studio. Sure. Yeah. So this is actually, you know, we touched on this, but then really dig deep into this idea of like content, game design and business. models, which this all ties around, right? So as you're designing a game where you need people to be, you know,

logging in every day and your goal is to keep them sort of over a year and there's some sort of tradeoffs of free-to-play engagement to, you know, money, spend and what percentages that's going to be, I'm curious how that, you know, design or you can, you know, you can use that Plans v. zombies in a specific example or other ones, like how you think about design for those kinds of mobile premium games and how that changes what types of. things you build compared to, you know, more traditional tabletop.

Yeah, the board game business model is very straightforward in that we're going to sell your box. It has some things at it. We hope you'll like it. Now you'll tell your friends and that'll get good reviews and that other people will buy it as a result. And that'll be enough sales to make the product have been worthwhile. Then the board game company will release more products and kind of repeat.

And then if it's a game that can be expanded and some can easily be expanded and some can't, And it's a blessing for you and for me that Ascension and Legendary both lend themselves very well to new expansions and new virgins. And in a way the players welcome and clamor for it and are eager to get more content for them. Yeah. The booster pack model, the magic sort of pioneered from a game perspective, is different in that you can buy $10 of magic cards and play them for a year. And some people do. you can buy $1,000 of magic cards and have a different experience

and anywhere in between and even above $1,000. Some people will spend even more than that. And it is a lot trickier to figure out what are the ways that you want to make it worthwhile for someone to buy more magic cards once they already have tons of them. And a lot of people have so many magic cards,

but they're like really, really want to get some more. And magic can be an expensive hobby, but when I think about that, I think, but the value people are getting out of it is even greater than the money they're spending. That's why we're spending the money on it. It's that they, it's so fun. It's like the best game of the world, essentially.

It's, it's getting so much value to lives. It's given an incredible value in my life as a consumer as well as some eventually worked on it compared to the money that I, that I spent on. Well, so, so it's, and this, you know, I, I agree that the, the sort of business model and the, the fact that magic has this sort of randomized discovery process and this sort of growth curve is part of what made it so compelling is that, you know, as new cars came out and you could build new things and new strategies became available to you, either just because you're getting started and buying new cards

or because new content has been released is really fascinating. But as everybody knows, there is that drawback of like, wow, okay, at some point for players, if they really want to see everything and explore everything, it can get very, very expensive. And that's actually where I think the deck building genre came about, that a deck building game is very much trying to get the joy of that discovery and the sort of creation and put it into a sense.

single box that you can buy for, you know, 40 bucks and, and play as much as you want and get the sort of, you know, full experience of that release, but still have its own different, more manageable expandability model. That was sort of main thing that attracted me to it in the first place. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And there are a lot of sort of former magic players out there who loved it in some time in their lives, but then things change. They have kids, their career heats up and they can't go to the magic store and play tournaments like they used too. And so other ways that they can scratch that itch are great for them. And that's certainly one of the things the deck building games bring to the table. That is awesome. And then also just

their gameplay of playing something like Ascension or Dominion or legendary is fundamentally very different than the gameplay of magic and has its own sort of cool things you can do and things you can achieve and things you can experience that magic doesn't itself provide. So all right, I believe and you know, people can correct me wrong, but I believe that you and I have made more sets of deck building games than any humans on the planet. I believe that yeah, the 15th

ascension set is on shells now. You mentioned the 20th at least ascensions, oh sorry, legendary set is on shells now. Yeah, I think up to 21 and a couple more of a can. Yeah, so and you know, who knows by the time this podcast released, we'll probably have another 20 sets, who know. So, you know,

I sort of want to dig into that and you mentioned kind of before we started recording that you had some thoughts both on the good and bad of Ascension as an inspiration. Because I, you know, obviously sort of Dominion came out and everybody was like, oh my God, there's this whole new thing. And I, you know, came out with Ascension and we had Nightfall and a couple of other games that all came out. And then Legendary became a real dominant player in the marketplace.

What kind of was your thinking? How did that get started? And I mean, we'll even dig into sort of thinking about deck building today. But let's start at the beginning. Cool. I appreciate you asking. I definitely, you know, I'm very interested in the topic of deck building. game design and I know you are too and it's fun to sort of have an opportunity to have the conversation with

someone who's been such a pioneer in a success in this area and uh ascension was uh it's an amazing game i love to death the played hundreds of times uh mostly digitally and the the playdeck uh digital version of ascension is also just an incredible adaptation like it flows so well it's very fast it's very uh the ui's fun the games just zip along and so i've been really impressed by that um it's also a cool part of the story of game design that it's still like a fairly young industry in the modern sense of board game design. Obviously, you have chess and go going back a very long time, and those are definitely board games that were designed by somebody. But in terms of like the modern renaissance of board game design, it's still a pretty young field. And as a result, it's evolving

very quickly. And every crop of games that comes out learns and benefits from the lessons and examples of the ones that came before. And so the overall, you know, the, the, the, the games that come out in a certain year get to learn for the ones that came out a few years before. And so often they find ways to build on the past and put forth new takes on it and benefit for the ones that came a little bit ahead of them. And so we're all, you're all standing on the shoulders of giants and, you know, I learned a lot from magic, learned a lot from ascension, learned a lot from other games that

I use to sort of build out what legendary eventually became if that makes sense. Yeah, that's, we're all, this is sort of semi-tangential point along this I talk about in the book, like all creativity is theft. Right? You are bringing, you, nobody comes up with ideas just out of the blue. They are all like taking things that existed

before and combining them in new ways and solving problems that have, you know, come up because of problems that got solved before that. So that's just, that's the game we're all playing. Right. And Dominion is also just a breathtaking achievement. in that it can be considered just a game amongst other games, but it turned out that it did pioneer a new category, and it's an incredible achievement of game design, and it comes up with sort of new ideas no one else it had before,

and it's great. It has many expanses itself that I've enjoyed, and I learned a ton from that as well, and I wouldn't, obviously, obviously, like I don't think Ascension or Legendary would have been made, at least not on the schedule they were, if Dominia hadn't come first. So obviously, very, very grateful to Donald X for making that one.

Yep, totally agree. And so Legendary has many genres that are parents to it. It is a deck-building game, and it's also a cooperative game where many players work together to beat the game itself. You are recruiting Marvel superheroes, for those who have not played it before. You're getting Iron Man and Thor and Spider-Man to help you out, and you're getting stronger and fighting supervillains that come out of this deck. But while you're doing that, the game itself is fighting back against you

and trying to win the game for able. So every game has its own mastermind like Magneto or Loki or Thanos, and the mastermind has a different scheme every game, where sometimes they're trying to flood the planet with melted glaciers, and sometimes they're trying to suck out all the oxygen for the world, and sometimes they're trying to fight the Cree Skrace World, or it's the Dark Phoenix saga, or all these sort of memorable storylines from the Marvel Universe, you get to replay, and any mastermind can sort of lead any scheme to crush you.

and every turn the bad guys do something, you get to do something, and they're creeping towards an evil victory in which all players will lose. You're trying to beat the Mastermind four times win for yourself, and then if you all win collectively, then one of you is the super best winner and is the most legendary hero

if you score a good points in all your friends. And so there's a whole era of cooperative board games that had a huge influence on legendary as well because it is a cooperative board game as much as it's a deck building game. And then finally, superhero games have their own tropes, their own wrinkles that had a big influence on Legendary as well. And so I played a ton of deck building games and a ton of sessions of each of them.

And I played a ton of cooperative games. And I love both genres, played a lot of superhero stuff too. And so all those things kind of percolating in my mind sort of helped to birth what Legendary eventually became. One piece of advice I would have for Aspired game designers is as you are playing the games that you enjoy, don't enjoy. Keep an inner monologue and sometimes a vocal monologue of what you like and don't like about them, what you would change about them if you could.

And if you keep talking about, hey, this game is fun, but I hate this part, or this game is fun, but it would be even better blah, blah, blah, then that is game design. And that is part of the path to making something new. And me playing a ton of sessions of cooperative games and very acceptable in the games and thinking to myself, hey, I like this game, but here's what will make it even better.

Or wouldn't it be cool if? and, you know, 20 threads of those conversations across years eventually got me the point where I had in my head enough of a sense of what I liked about those three genres that I could put forth something that was the things I liked the most about the genres, as we knew the genres hadn't had before, combined in a way that hadn't been done before, and hopefully make something that people would end up liking. Yeah, that's awesome. And I agree. And another sort of way I put this for people is like, you need to change. When you're playing games and you want to be a designer, you have to change the way you think while you play. It's the difference of sort of playing and being immersed in what's happening completely versus sort of looking at what is what emotions are coming up. What's making them come up?

How could it be better? How could it be worse? And constantly sort of thinking in those terms. You know, and that is a really important shift because you're, you know, that's where you're sort of honing your skill. of game design and assessment and the job of sort of crafting emotional experiences for people, you can see where it's working and where it's not every time you play games. And that's sort of one of the easiest ways for people to sort of make that shift without, you know, changing anything about their lives externally.

You're just changing the sort of internal response saying, okay, let me watch and pay more attention here as to what's coming up and what's, you know, what's working, what isn't. When are people checking out of a game and when are they super invested and what, you know, how would I get one thing to change to the other kind of thing? Right. I think that's a good point. And even if you don't have your own game prototypes that you've made so far, you can essentially be running playtest sessions of existing published board games whenever you play them. And if your friends are in this mindset that they want to think more about game design too, you can sort of have these conversations as you're playing of how would we collectively make this game better if we could. And sometimes you even can make the change to it. Sometimes it's harder to make a change like that. And when I play board games with my game designer friends, we're all critiquing it all the time. And a lot of them are pretty harsh critics, but we're always saying, why does it do this? This breaks this principle. This game should know better not to do thing XYZ. This part's frustrating. This part can be streamlined.

And they're always sort of trying to talk about making better as they go. And then that same kind of mentality bleeds over into when we're evaluating actual prototypes people have made for themselves and trying to say how to make it better, how to make it better. And in the latter case, the difference is that you're more likely to say, let's change out, let's change out, let's change out as you go with the author of the game sort of making those decisions. whereas when playing the published ones were less likely to actually change as we go.

We mostly complain about it or sing its praises as we go. Oh, yeah. Game designers get loved to complain about other people's games. Yeah, right. And you learn that way. I mean, it's helpful. And I think as a designer,

it's also good to welcome critiques to encourage people expressing that are negative whenever I'm running playtests of legendary or the digital games. I'm always telling people it's helpful to say things you don't like about. It's helpful to say what sucks. It's helpful to say what's frustrating.

Like, don't hold back to sort of spare our feelings. We'd rather you tell us the parts you hate. And that is a great lead-in to you telling me what was so bad about Ascension that you solved in Marvel Legendary. That's so funny. Yeah, as I said before, like, I love Ascentia death. It's a masterpiece in many ways,

and I have played a ton. In some ways, like Legendary is like a love. letter to the debt building games and the cooperative games that have come before. So I, so, so as, as you let in, I sort of have some thoughts on this topic. So playing Dominion, it's a great game. One of the things that I like about it is that when you see the initial setup of Dominion, it sparks all these ideas in your head where you say, oh, this is going to be especially cool game of Dominion because this board of 10 different stacks of cards has a lot of

bonus actions that let you play more action cards, a lot of card draw, a lot of me draw more actions, I'll get to play them together, and that'll be an awesome combo. I'm excited to sort of see how this setup plays out. Or you might say this Dominion setup that's different every time in that game,

has a really expensive action and a cheaper card to copies action, so that's a combo, and I can use one to copy other enough. Yeah, and so just to frame, I assume most of our audience is familiar with this, but with, you know, the main distinction between Dominion and Ascension is,

and the Dominion has a fixed set of cards that are laid out at the beginning of the game, and those are the only ones that will be available for the entirety of the game, whereas Ascension has a changing center row of cards that you see the first six, but you never know what's going to come up next. Right. And so the box of Dominion has something like 25 different card names and 10 copies of Beach. Every time you play, you pull out maybe, I don't know what the exact number is,

but something like 10 of those 25 stacks, put them all in front of you, and throughout the game you can buy off those identical stacks, and the stacks never change. And so some of the downsides of that Dominion setup are that, You have to read and process 10 different cards before you take your first turn. You think through all their combinations, all the things you would want to do with them. And that's a lot of reading and processing to do before you take your first turn. Like people want to go and play a board game. They don't want to just be reading all day.

You kind of have to like read and think a lot before you start the Minion. Or you have to just be okay with start and play before you read all the cards and making some suboptual moves because you haven't probably read everything yet. It helps a little bit in that game that if your first hand is three gold, then you can sort of ignore all things to the board that cost more than three, but you kind of can't ignore them because you need to be making your strategy of what you're going to get now that will combo the things you'll get later to make an

effective deck. And so you have to do a lot of processing. And another downside about the Dominion setup is that once you start the game, you don't get much new information as you go through. Sometimes your hand is different numbers of gold, so you can buy three instead of four, that's new information, or sometimes your opponent takes more attacks,

so you need more defenses. But on the whole, your initial read and analysis of the Dominion board is likely going to be correct throughout the game, or maybe you'll learn that the combo we thought was good actually sucks, but then it's too late. But you're not going to be surprised by new awesome things happening in the middle of the game of Dominion. It's great fun to watch your cobbos play out, to watch yourself get stronger, to build

a deck that is a stronger, stronger engine that's zipping along and try to race your frenemies. But you have no revelations as you proceed. And that's not awesome. I'm a big part of board games and other games being fun is like new and surprise things happening and how you react to that. So to contrast with Ascension, there's no initial setup at all, which is super fast and super awesome. And you'd get new information every turn as you go because new cards are flipping off the center row. So every turn is a new decision. And that part is super great.

The parts I don't like as much about Ascension and credit divinion are that when you set up a game of Ascension and the setup is basically take the deck out of the box and you're done. you don't get the feeling of, ooh, this game of this sense just be extra special because it's got this weird combo in the setup that's going to be extra fun to play out. Like you see a blank deck and the cards that flip it in the center row and you can evaluate those, but you don't get a sense of like, oh, this one has a clone and a powerful effect that can combine. Oh, this one has a bunch of little cantrips, meaning cards drawn extra card, and ways to empower you to play a bunch of littleizer cantrip or this one has a benefit from copper and a card that gives you more copper. Together that gives you more before. you don't have that initial sense of like this game of Sending is different from all the other games of Ascension I've played.

And then as you play through Ascension, for me, the experience ends up being largely similar to Creeves' games of Ascention I played. Sometimes I, like, lean into a synergy where I get a bunch of like, I'm not going to say this word, like Macana constructs. How do I really say that?

Yeah, McKenna. That's close-ish. Or you lean into board cards that thin your deck, or you lean into these green cards that are caring about other green cards, but you often kind of like, end up a little bit of everything.

You take good cards and your friends take good cards. And the game is, I feel like largely similar to other games of Cension I played. And so, like, I'd, like, thoroughly enjoy playing the hundreds of games of of Cension I've played, but they all kind of, like, blur together. Like, you don't have that many games of Cension that I could describe to you that are, like, singularly memorable. Like, this one-time Ascension, I did this cool thing because these combos were unusual.

They all kind of emerge into a collective, like, delightful experience that it's, like, always reliable. It's always fun. And it's, uh, it's hard to pick. individual moments out of that sort of like tapestry of essentially that makes sense. Sure, yeah. And so playing the nightfall deck building game, it's a little more obscure, but play deck did do an awesome adaptation of it. The colors on the cards really matter. Like, they have cards

in the game that are only good if you played a red card before them, although it's a little too complicated in that, they have these moons in the cards, and if you play this card, he gets the bonus, the previous card was red, but the previous card also has to say, the card after me is blue or something, so you only really get a match with the cards. The first one is red that loves blue, and the second one is blue that loves being played after red, if that makes sense.

It's hard to explain without the visuals. But the constraints are too specific. But it's cool that some of the cards are especially more powerful when there are other cards in the mix. Like the context of other cards and stacks explicitly changes the value. And then with the penny arcade deck building game that was also done on the play deck.

The ones that I could play in iOS myself 100 times, I learned a lot more from them than some of the paper ones that I could only play eight times of my friends, if that makes sense. Yeah. Eteration times. Yeah. No, exactly.

Right. It's a theme. So Penny Arcade has a couple of currencies. The cards are pretty simple. It's like flavorful. It's a great IP. They have end bosses, I believe, that you can't beat until you're really strong. Paul Sautasanti made that game

who is a designer who worked with me at Wizards making magic sets and now works I'm pretty sure at Riot Games still and it was inspiring to see him come out with Penny Arcade because I knew him as a colleague and I thought wow like if he can do it like maybe I can do it and seeing someone you know like achieve something makes much more plausible that you yourself can and I hear that for a lot of people

who are like trying to get the magic pro tour or something once their friend got on I play my friend all the time and sometimes beat him my friend on. Maybe I can get on too. And so that was inspiring to maybe think that I could sort of do something like this by myself. In cooperative games, is it okay if I could just kind of keep going on this a little bit? Okay. So some of the cooperative games that were big influence are things like Shadows over Camelot, Flashpoint Fire Rescue, battles War Galactica, Pandemic, Arkham Horror. And they all share the property that the game is trying to beat you.

you can all collect loose to the game. And every turn, there's going to be a bad guy action that happens essentially, and then a good guy action happens essentially. And that makes them roughly balanced for a number of players because you can have three players and then every round you have three bad actions, three good actions,

or five players, or a round you have five bad guy actions and five good actions. And I have a bunch of friends and family members who do not want to play cut throw games. I love competing. I love good of match tournaments. I love like crushing life for my enemy with my magical spells,

but some people don't like that, and they're basically not willing to play games like that at all. And so having them in mind maybe want to have a cooperative element in the game, and also just loving the feeling of, can we beat this unique challenge that Arkham Har presents, and the unique challenge that's different every time you play Arkham Har in some ways because you're different sort of H-1s you have to fight, although in some ways they don't affect the game as much as good.

but that was something that was very exciting to me and was like a new thing that other deck building games hadn't done before to be cooperative and in real life with Legendary there are some groups that play it completely cooperatively and ignore the victory points entirely and are just like, why do those even in the game, I'll get it?

And some players that are like, no, I play this game to defeat my friends and get more points than them. Like, yeah, if we die, then we all lose and that's one of the outcomes that can happen. But what I really care about is like being the best and being my friends. And it's fun in me,

that some players that say hurt, like there's a Hulk card that's like a craze rampage where he's going to wound all the other players that do a really big attack because he's just Hulk's going out of control. That's what it does the move is the comics. And the cooperative groups are like, well, it's a powerful card to drawback because he wounds everybody. The competitive players are like, this is my jam. Like, I want to get a powerful card that hurts on my friends and slows him down. Like, that's awesome for me. And they both see the card as sort of like making sense from a design perspective, but for different reasons. Right. Yeah, no, I think it's great to be able to to appeal to both of those audiences.

It's not an easy task to do. One of the things that I learned with Ascension is actually it has a far better appeal to a lot of the non-competitive groups. You know, a lot of times a girlfriend or boyfriend of a gamer can play Ascension with them

because even though it is a competitive game, it doesn't feel like as directly competitive. Like there's not a lot of direct attacking. You kind of get to build and do your own thing and kind of even if you lose, you build up your strategy and you get more powerful over time. Right. You kind of get to the end and then you just see what happens. And so then being able to add a layer to that where it's like, oh, no, no, no, we actually do have a collective victory or collective defeat moment at the end.

I think even further solidifies the joy for that type of player. Right. Exactly. And ascension is a race, essentially. You're not punching each other as much as you are trying to get the farthest by the end of the game. So sometimes you, you know, fight. bad guys that hurt your friends or something. But for the most part, you're raising. Well, yeah. And I actually, I want to dig in a little bit because I think the story of the bad guys

is a really interesting thing that we both have used in our in our games. Right. So, right, in ascension, I never attack another player. Right. It just, you know, I'm all, but I can destroy monsters. And the story of those monsters is like, well, I stopped them, but they did something bad to everybody else. Right. And so you, in fact, are, you know, doing the thing to the player. But the story, it feels very different than if it was a, I paid for resources to buy a card that hurt you. Right. And similarly, there's actually a really clever trick, I think, that you used in legendary, which is when the monsters strike you, when the villains strike you, they often force you to banish

heroes, which is kind of actually usually a good thing for the players, but it's told in this story that makes it a lot more, makes a lot more sense. Right. You know, as I mentioned earlier, earlier in the talk, we were, you know, the chapel strategy in Dominion is sort of one of the iconic thing of like realizing that getting cards out of your deck is actually one of the most powerful things you can do. No new player gets that, especially, I mean, you know, I was a pro tour player and game designer and I didn't get it at first.

A casual player never gets it. Right. And even in Ascension, we have a bunch of effects that make you banish cards or allow you to banish cards out of your deck. And new players never want to do that. Right. Because it just doesn't seem like, why would I want to get rid of cards? My cards are awesome. Those are the things I need.

And so tying that into like a villain that sort of forcibly does this to you and gets you to do the things that are going to move the ball forward. It feels like a good story because villains are killing heroes. It's a bad, quote unquote, effect. But it's serving this purpose of making the decks more efficient and moving the game forward. So I thought that was a really clever way to frame it. Cool. I appreciate saying so. And it definitely is learning from Dominion's Chapel and Ascension's, you know, trashing effects.

or the void or banishing, whatever the term is, you know, so many terms, pardon me. Yeah. So I agree with you, and I'd seen players in Dominion and Ascension reject those cards as not being appealing. And so I took two tactics to make them appealing and legendary, and I definitely wanted to include that element of thinning your deck,

and arguably you sort of have to include the deck build in the game. But it's just super fun for people who get it to, like, thin the cards out that are bad, know they're making the deck more efficient, know they're going to draw their better cards more frequently. And so one of the things I did was as you fight enemies, sort of tie it to the fights, like you said, so it says, you fight this bad guy and says, fight, colon, K-O-1 of your heroes. And so the flavor was like he died in a fight.

You know, you brave shield trooper died while fighting Juggernaut, and that's why you take him out of your deck. And early players might even see that as a drawback of like, oh, man, my shieldtribute died in the fight, but I guess ends the brakes. You got to kill Juggernaut. I got to stop him. So I'll suck up this bad thing that happened to me. action is very good for them to take out the bad shield to pursue the deck and draw the more

powerful cards more frequently. And then on the hero side, there are also some cards that will KO cards from your deck, but they all give you in the base set rewards for doing so. And so they'll say, you may KO a card from your hand or discard pile. If you do, you get plus one recruit, or if you do rescue bystander, or if you do, if you KOW wound this way, draw a card. And so they're telling you, you'll get a benefit for CAO in the cards. And so players that don't get why Kowings inherently good tell themselves, I'm getting benefit, I guess I'm supposed to do that, I guess I want the benefit, sure, I'll KO card for my discard pile to get an extra recruit, and if I'm going to chaos somebody,

I might as well kill my worst guy, and that's a shield troopers, so off he goes. And then over time, hopefully they eventually learned that they'll draw their Wolverine and Iron Man and Captain America cars more frequently if they're KO and the crappy shield troopers out of their deck. Right. But it kind of leads them on a path to not reject that before they've ever tried it. Yeah, so the the, the, the two kind of principles here is, you know, one principle we've talked about before, you know, you want to have this sort of path of discovery where over time you can kind of learn like, oh, wait, this is really good for me and I can gain benefits from this. But also the principle we haven't talked about as much, which is, in general, you want to make in your game what people's intuitions are about the right thing to do, the actually right thing to do. Right. you know, that if they're not, if they are, if they're seeing a card or seeing an effect and saying,

you know, this seems terrible. I don't want to engage with it. Then it doesn't matter if it's actually really great. You need, you want to be shifting the gears so that people can usually be like, oh, okay, this makes sense. I'm willing to make the sacrifice. I'm willing to move this ball, this ball forward. And if your, if your player instincts are leading in different directions, then, you know, you need to be making some changes.

Yeah, that's a good point. And from a video group perspective, one sort of obvious example is if there's a quarter, you want the player to go down, and the playtesters are not going down to quarter because it's too scary or they want to complete this area first, so they think that's going to be a trap or something, then you can do visual changes to make the quarter more appealing because there's more lights there, or you put a treasure at the end of it, or there's something there that signals you should go here and do this, and then like, oh, okay, I'll do that. And then once they do it, they're happy to did it. And so giving you

reward for caoing your own guys is kind of like that, where it's a signal that this is a good thing to do. This is not a punishment. This is a reward for you to take this overall action and your crew and chaos your guys and then along the way they're doing the thing that they'll eventually learn is super awesome and super fun yeah and and i think um so we're we're i know we're running a little bit over time here so i i do want to kind of advance to sort of the modern era of deck building games and i'll use it with one a small jump that's related to our previous conversation which is like you know we're sort of trying to find interesting ways to get people to to banish or chaos or whatever trash get cards out of their deck um another game that i think did

an interesting job of this was Tyrants of the Under Dark, which had, it's a promoting is the way they theme it. And then you take a guy, you promote it to the inner circle, and cards that are promoted are worth more points than ones that worst are still in your deck.

And so you can promote your starting cards, which are worth a few points to get rid of them, or there actually gives you a reason to promote and get rid of your, even your good cards, because they're worth a ton of points. So I thought that was both an interesting way to, like, theme the,

the caoing effect as something that's a positive as well as create more interesting decision space because like I might have I might you know

in our games you're never going to get rid of your best card that's just crazy talk here and now like oh maybe I would maybe it's a point in the game where I'd rather have the points

than have the card and so I found that to be a really interesting evolution to try to solve the same problem we were trying to solve yeah and so other things

that are in that space either triggering off that or other things about the modern deck building era that how do you think about days. Yeah, and like there's a Nick Fury battlefield promotion in the legendary first set that

COs shield officers and shield troopers but gives you, sorry, chaos the shield agents but gives you shield officers so it upgrades them into a better version. So it sort of makes it okay to kill them who's giving you a better version in return. And Dominion has some of that too where they have these estates worth one victory point that are in your initial deck and you're supposed to, quote, if you know what you're doing, trash those out of your deck as soon as possible because they give no goal at all. They do nothing that give you the victory points at the end. And you're going to be far ahead if you kill the estates

and draw your goal generating cards more quickly. But a lot of people don't like the idea of taking victory point cards out of their deck. It's counterinted to say, the point in this game is get victory points in your deck. So the first thing you choose is take them out. It's like, that's crazy. It doesn't make any sense to a lot of people until they get pretty far in Dominion. And so that's definitely

something that I would want to avoid. And so if I can hit a couple more points on the way Ligern React to the previous crop of games. So on the setup side, Legendary has an initial setup that presents a series of combos that you can sort of enjoy on their own merits and get excited about how they combine. In that, you select five heroes to use out of the 15-ish that are in the box, like Dominion. And the heroes are known going into the game, what hero sacs will have.

Every hero sack is five of common A, five of a, five of common B, three of the uncommon, one is the rare, and you mix them all together. And there's also a city that gets villains feeding into it from a villain deck on a sort of conveyor belt where they're popping off one at a time, and they're giving you new information as you go. And so every turn is a new decision to make and a new challenge of how will I deal with these cards on the good side and the bad side that have appeared since my last turn happened. but you get, I was hoping, sort of the benefits of the initial setup of,

oh, okay, this board has Hulk who's going to give me wounds, he's got Wolverine, who can heal wounds, it's got Rogue who can copy things, it's got Iceman, who's really good to play more blue cards, so that's great to copy. And your mind can get excited about some of those combos you see, but you also have the sort of per turn reveals that Ascension has. It's cooperative, but it doesn't sort of need an alpha player

like pandemic sort of requires, like the sort of famous knock in cooperative games is what if one player sort of takes over and tells her what to do and that's not fun. And many cooperative games can have that problem, but pandemic forces that problem by saying you can't really form a coherent plan of what to do in pandemic by yourself. The actions you take only can have a value in the context of other people working with you and go in the same place and you do the right cards. And so you kind of can't play individually. But in legendary, you can sort of all have your individual, all have a collective goal, but work towards it in your own way. and you've hidden information in your hand and it doesn't really help anyone else

to tell you what you do. You all kind of have to form your own strategy. Bledgner is a big emphasis on story, both sort of your personal stories and the stories from the movies and the comics where you can retell the story of all the Avengers movies and all the spin-off movies.

You can tell your own stories of, I had to fight this mastermind of this scheme, and I had these guys, and it's very evocative. Sentinel's the Multiverse is, a superhero cooperative game that was very inspirational, and it has big bad enemies in that game that have sort of plot lines to do with it, they're trying to crash the moon with the earth or something, but every mastermind is the same plot in that game every time you play, and in Legendary you can sort of mix and match, and that gives like a huge amount of replayability versus

having the same scheme, the same mastermind every time. In Ascension, I thought it was not awesome that if you let the nasty enemy live, the game never punishes you, in an early sense at least. The bad guy kind of sits there and he's really tough, but he takes all the time in the world to hang out before you can must have tactic to beat him.

And making Legendner, I thought, wouldn't be cool if the enemies punish you if you took too long before you bought them. They didn't diss it around. And so the enemies kind of get pushed through the city and if you don't beat them fast enough, they will escape the city and punish you as they leave. And it gives us higher sense of stakes and

tension of, oh, no, this bad guy of the nasty escape effect is closer to the end of the city, what are we going to do collectively to kill this guy before he can get away? You know, can anyone save us? And your friend finally kills me, like, oh, thank God you killed him. And you feel a sense of reciprocity and gratitude. The board sort of has more of a sense of place for that reason. Once upon a time, I briefly had some things that could, were generic guys that could help you fight, that were vaguely similar to the shield, sorry, the heavy image.

infantry in Ascension. But one of the things I didn't love about Ascension is that some people think a great strategy is like buy tons of heavy infantry just like kill the monsters really fast and run out the game really quickly before your opponent's fantasy combos can get going. And in the Marvel IP in particular, like having with a shield assault squads like fight the supervillains is like not what the IP is about. Like that is a very bad fit to superhero stories. In essentially it's a little better fit to have heavy injury killed the monsters but for Marvel it's very bad fit. And so we didn't have heavy imagery and instead just rely on having enough attack points in the heroes as we get you what you need.

We didn't have any cultist equivalence in legendary because it's not a great fit to superhero stories to fight the exact same dude a million times. It's a better fit to the sort of dark fantasy world of ascension. Instead, we have this sort of henchmen that recur frequently and are low power and give you benefits or killing them. But it's not endless. It's just frequent. Right. And so do you now, you know, you've done 20, however many sets with the ones that you've been working on that aren't released yet. And how do you think about the deck building genre today compared to, you know, eight years ago, 10 years ago, whatever, when we were first getting started in this process?

Yeah, I'd be curious to get your take on it, but it's interesting that there was a dominion, and then there was a pretty big crop of follow-up games, some of it were awesome, some of which less so. And then Legendary sort of came after that initial crop of Ascension and Pan Arcade and Nightball and some others. and then there has been not as many since then. Like the workhorses have kept pumping out new sets. The Dominions a lot of sets also, honestly. The Sension is an awesome number of them and Legendary's Bunch, too. But there haven't been as many new ones coming out that have sort of tried to take brand-new ideas and bring them in. Like Shards Infinity from your company is out and has cool new ideas, but there's not that many games.

There isn't as much for the sort of gold rush as it used to be. And I'm not quite sure why that is. I don't know what your thoughts are. Yeah, I still feel like there's quite a few deck building games out there. And I think that the thing, the space that's interesting to me, I mean, obviously we released Shards of Infinity because I had some ideas I really wanted to see and create a different sort of style of game. And that, you know, we built the mastery track as a sort of main innovation in that one where you actually are like sort of leveling up your player as well as like getting better cards. Yeah. Sort of influences across the board because that feeling of progress is the core fun of the deck building game.

And that was really interesting. But then there's, you know, for what I really like to see is the deck building genre getting sort of merged into other worlds and with other components. So like Slay the Spire and now some games are following up where you take the sort of deck building and combine it with a rogue like where you're going on adventures and it sort of forces you into these interesting paths and stories I think is a really interesting space. You've seen now a lot of deck building games that are trying to integrate with boards and tactical, you know, positioning. So, you know, I mentioned Tyrants the Underdark as well as Clank and other ones that are sort of taking these genres and introducing spatial relations. And it's actually something I recently introduced into Ascension with Skulls and Sales was a set just released that has, you know, you have pirate tricks. Yeah, exactly. And I get to tell awesome, ridiculous stories and try to make the monsters more scary addressing one of the points that's totally valid that, you know, the monsters are just kind of punching bags in initial Ascension.

And then, you know, how does spatial relations, and literally in the Skulls and Sales case, spatial relations I just built into the cards. Like so the center row is the spaces, as opposed to the other games that I mentioned, where there's a separate board that you're using spaces on. And so that was all interesting challenges. And trying to, you know, sort of re, the fundamentals of deck building, I view is now just sort of one of the building blocks of games. Right, a tool. just like the match three

kind of has been used a million ways and candy crush and bejeweled and whatever and the question is how does that tool get not just sort of improved and refined but how do you fit that tool and fit that piece in with other genres to create cool, exciting new things. Right. Yeah, you make a good point about

Slate as far is a total masterpiece. I have hundreds of hours that one and it's got it so good. And combining Rogue Lake with deck building is a great fit. mentioned Tyrus Thunder Dark and Clank and those are ones that I didn't have my head when I said there have been as many innovations recently

as many new ones because those ones are innovative and they are recent so in charge of validity of course as well and so I guess I just didn't have the examples kind of at my fingertips like I maybe should have yeah well it's it's always it's fun as you said and you know we'll kind of wrap up shortly here but like the

we're all you know standing on the shoulders of giants the industry all sort of has the benefit of learning from what worked and what didn't work in the past. In the same way when we sit around with our friends and have play games and have those exact conversations, those are the things that then become the seeds of the next generation of stuff. Right. And part of why, you know, I like having these conversations and sharing them with people is because then we will be able to help inspire that next generation when they can say, oh, man,

Ascension and legendary, they are all these failures. Let me fix that. And, you know, I look forward to playing those games. Me too. I mean, I want to see people make better versions of. of legendary, meta versions of TCGs and keep moving the standard forward. Right. It's really the key thing is like the heart of all this stuff is we grew up loving,

playing these games. And sometimes there was a game I needed to see that didn't exist, so I had to make it. But if somebody else can make it, that's way less work for me. So please do. Please make awesome games I can play. Right. So I, you know, sort of to wrap up, if there are people out now that are fans of yours, they want to see more of your stuff.

about what you're up to? Are there places that they can go, things they should check out? How do people follow you? Yeah, I'm not really on the Twitter. If you look at my, if you Google Devilow and Board Game Geek or BG, then they'll take that page a list a bunch of my projects and has links to them. That's probably the best place for people to see what I've been up to and any new stuff will be there. Planes versus Zombies Heroes is the latest thing I've released on phones.

And if you like Big One Games or TCTs, it's a good chance for. tool like that. Legend is obviously out there. Yeah, I think that's the best place to catch up. Great. Yeah, no, there's plenty. You've already given people hundreds or thousands of hours of entertainment in just those few statements. So I think people will be very excited to play that.

And I am very excited to have had this conversation with you. It's been super fun. And, you know, there's actually a ton of topics that we didn't even get to touch on here. So I'm hoping we'll be able to do this again soon. Cool. That sounds great. And come to think of it. There's a link from that we're going to be page to 50 game design essays I wrote for magic.

Dot wizards.com back of the day when I was working at wizards. And so they may be a little outdated now because it's been many years since then. But the kinds of beliefs I have of a game design are often still true from those days. Great. So plenty more material for people to dig into. And we'll do some research before the next time we get to chat and they get to hear us. So thanks very much, Devin, for taking the time. This was awesome.

Cool. And I just want to say also that one of the things I found inspirational about your career is not just that you made an awesome game, but that you took the leap to make your own company, right? Like a lot of people don't necessarily have the guts to bet on themselves so much and to sort of like believe that this will work out and have the confidence to like make it their whole career, like their own company and like trying to invest in all the inventory and making all that work out logistically and hiring a bunch of people. and it's just like an awesome achievement that has helped to bring a lot of cool games skills, so I'm impressed by that. Oh, thank you. I really appreciate that. Well, it's, you know, these sorts of things are always scary when you take a leap to try to make your dreams come true, and they don't always work out, but I sort of came to the conclusion that the cost of failure was lower than the cost of not trying.

So I look for, you know, and yeah, you've accomplished a lot and jump to a lot of different spots here too. So it's a real honor, and I appreciate that. those kind words, and we will talk again soon. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Thanks for making the podcast. It's been fun to listen to it. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. If you want to support the podcast, please rate, comment, and share on your favorite podcast platforms, such as iTunes, Stitcher, or whatever device you're listening on. Listen to reviews and shares make a huge difference and help us grow this community and will allow me to bring more amazing guests and insights to you.

I've taken the insights from these interviews along with my 20 years of experience in the game industry and compressed it all into a book with the same title as this podcast, Think Like a Game Designer. In it, I give step-by-step instructions on how to apply the lessons from these great designers and bring your own games to life. If you think you might be interested, you can check out the book at think like a game designer.com or wherever find books are sold.